Two French prisoners escaped from jail after sawing through the bars of their cells and using bedsheets to get out of the facility, a prosecutor said Thursday.
Guards noticed the break-out shortly before dawn, the prisons’ authority said. The facility is in the eastern city of Dijon.
The pair “seem to have sawn through bars” and “fled using bed sheets,” Dijon prosecutor Olivier Caracotch said. He did not provide further details on how exactly they used the bedding.
Union official Ahmed Saih, who represents prison officers at the facility, said the inmates used “old-fashioned, manual saw blades”.
The fugitives are a 19-year-old man held in pre-trial detention since October 2024 for attempted murder in a drug-related case, and a 32-year-old man incarcerated since 2023 over threats and violence against a partner, Caracotch said.
ARNAUD FINISTRE /AFP via Getty Images
“Warning about the risk of a jail break for months”
The prison break comes 10 days after another escape in the western city of Rennes. A 37-year-old convict, who had more than year left to serve for theft, fled during an outing with fellow prisoners to the city’s planetarium. It was not immediately clear if he had been caught. The prison’s director was fired by Gerald Darmanin, France’s justice minister who is pushing through a plan to lock up the most dangerous drug traffickers in supermax prisons.
France has some of the worst prison overcrowding in Europe, ranking third worst after Slovenia and Cyprus, according to a Council of Europe report published in July. In early October, the national average was 135 inmates per 100 places available. Dijon prison, built in 1853, is in poor condition, with 311 inmates for 180 places, according to the justice ministry.
“Prison is very hard here,” an inmate released on Thursday after eight months, told AFP. “There were three of us in a cell: two on bunk beds and one sleeping on the floor.”
Staff unions have complained that the state is neglecting normal jails as it moves narco criminals into new supermax prisons. Three prison directors’ unions criticized Darmanin in a statement on Wednesday, before the Dijon escape. They accused him of “devoting all the resources of a debt-ridden state” to the high-security prisons for those accused of drug trafficking and jihadist attacks, and neglecting the “vast majority” of other jails.
“While the justice minister parades around in overfunded facilities, other (prison) services are suffering,” they said in a joint statement.
Saih said there had been reports of saw blades found inside the Dijon prison, and that staff had “been warning about the risk of a jail break for months.” He called for more staff and better equipment, including “gratings that cannot be sawn through.”
Darmanin last week announced the Dijon facility was scheduled to receive $7.3 million, as part of a program to eradicate mobile phones from six French prisons.